“The shortfall of teaching funding has badly hit the salaries of academic staff, which have shown practically no increase in real terms over two decades. This at a time when professionals in virtually every other sector, including school teaching and the health professions, have improved their positions significantly; and when competition among graduate employers at home and abroad for the most talented potential university researchers and teachers is greater than ever. An estimated 1,000 UK academics have left jobs here for universities abroad, a quarter alone going to the US.” – Tony Blair, 14 January 2004

The medianarrative of the current national dispute over university lecturers’ pay follows a traditional pattern for public sector pay disputes: uncaring strikers holding innocent victims to ransom while they hold out for an unreasonable pay increase.

But the reality is that university vice chancellors, with the support of the press and the government, are seeking to exploit the perceived weakness of university teaching unions the AUT and NATFHE to strangle our industrial action. The pay campaign, which dates back to last September, has now entered a critical phase. With exams imminent, and union members across the university sector boycotting assessment, a number of university vice-chancellors have started, or threatened to stop all or part of the salaries of those academics refusing to submit marks or set exams.

In many cases, as here at Bournemouth University, striking lecturers have been turning cartwheels to minimise disruption to students, by continuing to mark, give feedback and letting students know marks while not feeding them into the system. The university’s threat of a de facto lockout has hardened attitudes among staff and prompted sympathy from students. NATFHE is seeking advice about the legality of the threats, while 300 branch members at Northumbria University have voted for all-out strike action until their lock-out threat is lifted.

Our experience does not reflect the views of students reported in the corporate media. Yes, there is widespread concern and frustration. But students understand the chronic crisis in academic pay – a 40 per cent decline in relative salaries since 1992 – that has led to our claim; they resent the fact that the employers refused to respond to the claim until we began our action; and they are horrified that our reasonable approach is being met with the iron fist of suspension without pay.

They are also conscious of what is really at stake here. Writing in this week’s Times Higher Education Supplement, Chaminda Jayanetti says: “Our lecturers were promised that at least a third of tuition-fee income would be used to improve academic pay. If universities are allowed to break their word to academics who have given up trying to hold them to it, then they could consider themselves free to break the promises they made to us students, too.”

As a senior lecturer, I earn £31000. As a computing student at yesterday’s Bournemouth SU UGM pointed out, he earns more than his lecturers when he is on a work placement. Having worked many years in the private sector, I can honestly say that working in a university is the most demanding job I have ever had. The government and the employers accepted that something needed to be done to address the pay crisis back in 2004, when they were pushing through top-up fees in the teeth of opposition from the teaching and student unions. Over the past three years, university vice-chancellors have awarded themselves an average 25 per cent increase, with an average salary of £154000 and nearly half enjoying an increase between 26 per cent and 49 per cent.

The employers’ latest offer, of 12.5 per cent over the next three years, represents an increase barely ahead of inflation, which is why AUT and NATFHE negotiators had no need – despite the weasel words of ultra-Blairite Education Secretary Alan “I’m not getting involved” Johnson – to refer it back to us.

The employers’ position and actions are deeply cynical. With an additional £4 billion coming into higher education over the next three years, they mistakenly believe they can force – starve, if necessary – academics back to work and deny them a once in a generation opportunity to fix the pay crisis.

Peter Knight, vice-chancellor of the University of Central England, has seen his salary increase by 28 per cent, from £130,000 to £160,000 over the past three years, an increase almost equivalent to my total salary. As he put it on the opening day or our action: “If pay is stopped, the action will collapse. While there is proper and understandable loyalty to the unions from their members, there is a limit to that loyalty and it will get severely tested at pay day.”

We cannot and will not give in to cynicism and bullying. If you care about university education in this country, please support us.